An ardent film fan, Linklater started the Austin Film Society when he was 25 years old, hosting public screenings of classic and independent films. A few years later, teaching himself the trade, he filmed a short called It's Impossible to Learn to Plow By Reading Books. In 1989, Linklater made his first feature film, Slacker. It tells myriad short stories by changing the film's perspective from character to character, scene to scene, as a parade of 20-something lazies, burn-outs, anarchists, beatniks, and other lost and found souls live one day of their lives. Without a distributor, Slacker earned its good reputation at film festivals in 1990, before finally being released to theaters in 1991.

Some of Linklater's films seem to be aimed at a mainstream audience (School of Rock, The Newton Boys, Dazed and Confused), alternating with smaller, more artsy films (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, SubUrbia, Tape). With Waking Life and Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, Linklater has been one of the first mainstream filmmakers to make entire films with the computer animation known as "rotoscoping", filming the actors with a video camera and later "painting" them on a computer.

If there is one recurring element in Linklater's wildly diverse films, it might be the thoughtful, sometimes deep or even existential dialogue, spoken by ordinary characters in ordinary situations. And rather like real people, before and after their moments of profundity, Linklater's same characters are just as likely to crack a joke. At his best, in films like Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and SubUrbia, Linklater seems to capture the subcultures he's filmed almost perfectly, as if the events really happened but the camera was invisible.

In 2003, Linklater teamed up with Mike White and Jack Black to make School of Rock, a delightful comedy and a huge box-office hit. In 2006, he grafted a plot onto the non-fiction exposť Fast Food Nation to make it into a complicated comedy of contaminated beef and low-wage life in America, starring Greg Kinnear and Bruce Willis.